Curriculum: scrutinise the evidence before you change tack
If you want to take your school’s curriculum in a new direction, first check that the research supports your ideas – and that teachers are trained to implement them, says Alex Quigley
After being nudged by Ofsted, school leaders in England are paying more attention to the curriculum than ever before. And in their search for guidance, new certainties have quickly emerged, along with cottage industries proclaiming truths about curriculum development.
Based on this, heads could be forgiven for thinking that if their curriculum isn’t knowledge-rich and underpinned by retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving, they are getting it all wrong. But do we have good evidence for these principles of curriculum or, in fact, any other models? Or are we riding a wave of optimistic ideas that will crash into the wall of the lived reality of classrooms?
Alas, there is not a great deal of robust evidence-informed guidance about building a curriculum. And, as education academic Dylan Wiliam has articulated, the reality of curriculum development is that it is really difficult: “It is rarely given enough time, is generally done by teachers working alone and tends to be done as an ad hoc activity.”
That said, several curriculum developments have been captured in independent trials. For example, one where a particularly knowledge-rich focus was put under the spotlight was the Word and World Reading project. Developed by the Curriculum Centre, it was based on the “core knowledge” work of US researcher E D Hirsch. The independent findings of the trial revealed it had no impact on primary pupils’ outcomes.
The really interesting detail in the evaluation was that primary teachers’ subject knowledge was insufficient in many cases to teach the curriculum. This highlights a crucial truth: curriculum development is not solely about sequencing topics, knowledge and skills - it is a teacher development challenge.
Another study suggests an additional issue. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Teaching and Learning International Survey revealed that more than half of principals in England had never undertaken CPD on “instructional leadership”. So, school leaders may be under-trained for leading the development of curriculum and teaching, too.
What about the evidence for the cognitive science-inspired curriculum principles that seem so popular, such as retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving? They appear promising in lab studies, but how much do we really know about their application to English classrooms? Some evidence is emerging but exciting ideas need to be implemented skilfully.
Teachers require high-quality training, ongoing support and time to successfully implement a new curriculum. Sadly, our teachers are definitively short on such time. In the research, the average number of hours teachers across the OECD worked per week was 38.8. The English teacher workload equivalent? A whopping 46.9 hours.
Teachers are gallantly trying to redesign their curricula despite these challenges. However, we have decades of evidence and expert insight underlining how acute these difficulties are, so they need to be properly recognised.
Everyone talking about curriculum is surely a good thing. Not focusing on spurious data is surely a good thing. Crucially, though, we need to recognise just how difficult a task we have set ourselves.
Alex Quigley is national content manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a former teacher and the author of Closing the Vocabulary Gap
